


theory vs application

by fourshoesfrank



Category: Among Us (Video Game)
Genre: Babysitting, Found Family, Gen, The Skeld (Among Us), Two Impostors (Among Us)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 12,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27600532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank
Summary: It's generally frowned upon to leave your children with a potential impostor, but Red seems so nice, and Purple and Cyan are so busy....
Relationships: Brown & Red (Among Us), Brown & mini crewmate, Cyan/Purple (Among Us), Green & Red (Among Us), Red & mini crewmate, mini crewmates & each other
Comments: 52
Kudos: 116





	1. The Handbook

The MIRA handbook says,  _We understand that it has become common to bring children into space, but we advise against allowing them to roam free._

The  _Skeld's_ captain says, "Curfew for the kiddos is 8PM sharp. Keep 'em within sight lines at all times."

The MIRA handbook says,  _We do not know what aspects of the human form appear appetitzing, and we have no way of knowing who is at risk. Please keep your children under close supervision._

The  _Skeld's_ doctor says, "Those bites're the darndest things to clean up, I'll tell ya. Something in their saliva prevents blood clotting. I bet a human heart's like a little Capri Sun to 'em."

The MIRA handbook says,  _For exceptionally long voyages, the security room may be temporarily repurposed as a daycare, provided the children's presence does not hamper the abilities of the security officer._

The  _Skeld's_ chief of security laughs and says, "Oh, I don't mind the kids. I just put some cafe chairs in a circle at the back and let 'em go nuts. They like listening to my reports. Just keep their messes off my white suit, alright?"

The MIRA handbook says,  _Every crewmate will submit a blood sample for examination before the voyage commences._

The  _Skeld's_ head xenobiologist says, "It's such a headache, trying to keep track of alien blood types. One of these days, I'm gonna totally forget which ones are legit and which ones are dangerous and just let one of them on board. I swear to God, they're just so complicated!"

The MIRA handbook says,  _Be careful._

The parents among the  _Skeld's_ crew tell themselves, "We'll do our best."

-

Two weeks into the voyage and there's absolutely no sign of any baby-eating blood-drinking crewmate-chomping monsters anywhere on the ship. To be perfectly honestly, Dandria and Youssef Oulehdri don't think there's  any impostor on board at all. That's not unheard of; some voyages seem to just fly under the radar (ha!) of whatever alien intelligence network places the infiltrators onboard. Maybe they're not important enough, maybe they're short a few crew members... who knows?

Dandria certainly doesn't want to know. She would definitely overthink every assignment if she knew the exact parameters that would make it look inviting to them. Her purple spacesuit would gather dust in her closet while she slaved away at some cushy desk job back at headquarters, too afraid to choose between the exciting missions and the safe ones. She prefers to blindly select her missions, whenever she has the opportunity.

Youssef, her husband, is basically the complete opposite in terms of decision making. He likes to have all the facts, all the pros and cons, before he decides on a mission. And by some strange trick of fate, they've landed themselves on the same ships at the same times for years now. It's fun, even if both of them are halfway convinced that the 'fate' in question is just a bored personnel higher up.

Dandria and Youssef live with two children, although only one, Estelle, is their combined biological offspring. Estelle's half sister, Safiyah, was the product of Youssef's college fling with an exchange student from the planet Buloz. The girls like each other well enough, even if Estelle hardly ever looks up from her sketchbook and Safiyah spends most of her time in the cafeteria trying to break into the vending machines.

They get along with the other three kids on the ship pretty well. Jade Toulan, the security chief's niece, likes to show them the music she listens to on her "deejay hiphop" headphones. Prashant Goyal, son of a the ship's xenobiologist and storage manager, carries around a dry-erase board to play Hangman and Pictionary with the other kids. And Frank O'Malley, the doctor's kid, really likes talking about Ancient Egypt. Like,  _really_ likes it. Absolutely no one on board the  _Skeld_ would be surprised if ze wrote a book about it one day.

It's been a quiet two weeks. The kids spend their days in Toulan's security office, the adults spend their days keeping the ship in order and getting to know each other, and  _nobody dies._ It's a novel break from everyone's string of previous tension-filled voyages.

And then the lights go out. And the switches won't fix them. Dane Dixon, the ship's electrician-slash-engineer, assures the crew that this is a side effect of passing through a heavily magnetized cloud, but these assurances fall on deaf ears as everyone begins muttering about sabatoge.

The omnipresent darkness means that Toulan can't keep sitting in front of her screens all day in Security. Screens that only display spotty thermals and barely-there infrareds don't help her keep the ship safe. Toulan equips herself with a flashlight, a stun gun, and of the ECB's (Emergency Corpse Button) that had almost seemed obsolete just a few days ago. Thus armed, she begins to patrol the darkened corridors like a guard in an old prison movie, walking stiffly with the light taped to the top of her helmet and the stun gun easily visible on her belt. Toulan is the first to start wearing her helmet inside again.

With the security officer absent and the lights in the security office not working, the kids will have to go someplace else. At first, the cafeteria seems like an obvious suggestion, before Dr. O'Malley points out the possibility that one of them might accidentally hit the emergency button (no acronym for this one). There's more deliberation, lots more of it, but in the end the crew decides to just keep their kids with their respective parents throughout the day.

This goes well for about half an hour before Prashant Goyal manages to tip over a fuel can full of priceless engine oil, thereby costing the entire crew four hours of cleanup and salvage time. Anila Goyal promises not to take the overtime pay for the cleanup, and suddenly everyone remembers why the kids were kept away from all the ship's inner workings in the first place.

There's another meeting, and it takes even longer than the last one, and nobody comes up with a satisfactory solution. Toulan suggests leaving the kids in each family's respective quarters during the day except for mealtimes and the parents' time off, but this idea is quickly shot down. The threat of an impostor feels more real in the dark, and nobody wants to leave their kids alone.

Anila and Jagraj Goyal give Prashant some new dry-erase markers (they're hardly 'new'; they've been in storage for god knows how many voyages, but they're colorful and not dried out and honestly, what difference does it make to a five year old), and everyone tries to watch the kids more closely.

Dandria and Youssef try to keep one eye each on Estelle and Safiyah, they really try. But kids will be kids, and one day Toulan comes marching down to Youssef's station in the lower engine room with a bedraggled, cyan-suited child trailing behind her.

"Samira was trying to get into the vents," Toulan says, and Youssef is too stressed and ashamed to even correct the erroneous pronunciation of Safiyah. He gives the kid a quick lecture while he calibrates the engine and thinks,  _That's it._


	2. The Cat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> figured out how to get rid of those giant spaces between paragraphs lol

"Babe, we can't, I'm not going to leave the kids with anybody other than—"

"We can't just let them go wild! They'll find something to do, there's lots of things to do in Electrical!"

"But there's also another  person in Electrical... Sef, he's hardly even talked to us, we don't know anything about—"

"I'm sure Dixon's a great guy! There's no way he's not human. Trust me. This'll be great; the kids'll be happy and we won't be stressed! C'mon, think about it."

A sigh. "You better get those divorce papers on standby, 'cause if the girls get eaten..."

"Oh, I'm surprised you'd be restrained enough to wait for divorce before you murdered me, too." 

-

Dane has never actually touched a human child. He doesn't want to, either. They seem pretty fragile. Always making those distressed noises. 

Well, the small purple girl and slightly larger cyan child don't make those noises, at least not where Dane can hear. 

He said he'd watch them, so he does. Dane understands that 'to watch a child' is a figure of speech that actually means 'to keep them out of trouble', but he finds himself tempted to just. Watch them. Humans fascinate him. 

The girls aren't afraid of Dane. Why would they be? The young one has no real concept of the alien threat, and the older one is half alien herself. She doesn't look like one of Dane's species, but. He is a "shapeshifter," according to MIRA's Self Defense Pamphlets.  _Be wary of any crew members who seem to change their appearance dramatically or rapidly._

Dane has only made one change to his human face. He started the voyage with a smooth chin and cheeks; now he has a 'beard' there. The humans seem to have accepted this as "par for the course." Normal. 

The young purple child likes to grab his beard and pull on it. The older cyan child scoffs and tells him he looks like a "hipster" from the 21st century. They both seem to think he looks normal. 

-

"I don't get why I can't just go in the vents. It's not like anybody's actually gotten  _killed_ yet... Why's everybody so scared of an impostor?"

The cyan child—Safiyah, the younger one calls her Saffie but Dane's crewmates call her Safiyah—is trying to convince Dane to let her into the vents. Dane can't do that. She might ask why  he feels so at home in the vents. 

Instead, he says, "It's not safe. You could be electrocuted."

That was the wrong answer. "And I can't get electrocuted in  _Electrical_ _?"_ she shoots back, twisting her tan face into a snarl that looks _very_ Boluzan. Her yellow gaze stares Dane down, boring into his own plain brown human-eyes. But he doesn't waver. 

"The wires in here are insulated. They're safe." To prove it, he takes the bright yellow cable he's been reconnecting into his mouth and bites down, like a "hot dog." Safiyah looks unimpressed. But she stops asking to go into the vents, which Dane counts as a victory. 

Her younger sister, Estelle—Stella for short, although Dane has never understood the human concept of "Nick names"—doesn't talk to Dane very much. She doesn't talk very much at all. Sometimes she points to pictures she's drawn instead of saying the words out loud. Dane thinks this is a revolutionary new medium of communication, but when he tries to praise her for it during a meal, Toulan walks over and reminds the girl to "use her words." No one knows what to say to that. 

Estelle draws pictures of Dane sometimes. She's a very good artist, in his humble alien opinion. If he weren't so afraid of discovery, he would change his face to match what she draws. But the human paranoia of the Other has settled over the crew once more. So he doesn't change. 

Keeping one form for this long makes Dane feel itchy and cramped. He wants to become literally anything else after three weeks in this fleshy, gristly body with its weird calcium bones and even weirder iron blood. But there's no helping it. He has to stay human-looking, has to avoid suspicion, has to be a good little electrician-slash-engineer. Has to be a good little babysitter now, too.

-

The O'Malley family has a cat. It's an orange tomcat named Thomas, which seems to amuse the humans to no end. Dane doesn't understand the joke behind the cat's name, but he does understand that Thomas O'Malley has somehow gotten into the vents. And Dane has to go get him out. 

It's after midnight, what the humans call "the graveyard shift." The ship is quiet. All the young humans—children, he reminds himself, the word is children—have long since gone to sleep. Dane can enter the vents without being observed. So he's done that. 

The urge to become something smaller and more aerodynamic, something that wouldn't suffer an injury from touching exposed wiring, nearly overwhelms him. But he has to keep this form, the bearded man with the plain brown eyes and the big nose. The cat won't be scared of the bearded man. 

The cat isn't hard to track down, even with a human's limited senses. Dane just follows the noise and finds the small orange animal yowling in the L-shaped vent that leads to the upper engine room. It takes him less than half an hour to extract Thomas O'Malley and walk over to the O'Malley family's quarters, where he knocks on the door with his free hand. He holds the cat up to the door's window and waits. 

Dr. O'Malley opens the door, rubbing his eyes and yawning. Dane yawns back, because humans do that. He then holds out the cat and says, "I found him in the vents."

"Oh, thanks so much," O'Malley says. "Tom's been trying to pry the vent up from the floor for days, we don't know why... Maybe cats can smell 'em, heh." Dane doesn't need to ask who  _they_ might be. He just smiles and huffs a laugh through his big nose. It's a very human-sounding laugh. 

"Hey, be careful crawling around up there," the doctor says after a moment's silence. "I'd hate to have to stitch a bite up on you."

"I'll be careful," Dane promises, then adds, "Thanks, Doc."

O'Malley nods and closes the door. Dane can hear him scolding the cat as he walks down the hall to his own quarters. He passes a black door (empty, they're on duty and single), a cyan door (empty, Youssef stays in his wife's purple quarters), a brown door (occupied, their shift starts in the morning and they're always tired), and a white door (should be occupied, since Toulan's off duty, but she might be out doing her patrols anyway). 

After the white door is a red one. Dane holds his (forged) ID card up to the small scanner above the door handle and listens for the  _beep_ that sounds when the door unlocks itself. 

The door beeps. Dane doesn't move to push it open. He hears something else, coming from one of the rooms he passed on his way back. He backtracks; it's not Toulan, not Muñoz, not the empty cyan quarters... 

Wait. He presses the side of his head to the cold metal door and listens for a moment before identifying the sound. It's a metallic  _clank_ noise, like a small hammer being dropped over and over again. Maybe one of the gravity stabilizers is out of order, turning itself off and on for no reason. That would explain the repetition, the same  _clank clank clank_ over and over and over. Dane sighs and punches in the repairman override, then shoves the door open, anxious to get this over with. 


	3. The Vent

The  _clank_ noise is definitely not a faulty gravity stabilizer. It's a small cyan child. He sees Safiyah Oulehri kneeling in the corner of the room with her back to the door, doing something to the vent in the floor. The quarters are bare except for a dusty metal stool in the middle of the room, no doubt forgotten after Youssef moved into Dandria's quarters entirely. There's just the stool, the child, and Dane in the doorway. 

He clears his throat. "Safiyah?" he asks quietly as he steps into the room and closes the door behind him. She doesn't look up, so Dane walks over to her. He looks over her shoulder to see what she's doing. 

There's a flathead screwdriver in her hand, and she's pounding it into the top of the vent over and over again. Dane thinks she's trying to punch a hole through the thin metal. She'd probably have done it already if the blows were all landing in the same spot. Instead they're erratic, falling all over the place and creating a veritable constellation of dents in the surface. 

Dane puts a hand on her shoulder. She doesn't have a suit on, just a standard-issue set of cyan pajamas that look too big for her. They're probably her father's. Dane can't feel the texture through the gloves of his suit, but he knows it's soft. Like the cat was.

Safiyah lets out a very cat-like hiss and flinches away from Dane's touch like it's burned her. He quickly withdraws his hand and inspects his glove for any harmful substances, but it looks clean. What else makes children hiss at people?

Oh, she's crying. He can see her face now, and she's definitely crying. She's making those distressed noises and her eyes are leaking a salty-smelling fluid and her nose is red and that's leaking too and—

"Go away," Safiyah snarls. There's enough venom in her voice to make Dane seriously consider just leaving her to her vent-stabbing activity, but he stays put. He sits down a few feet away from her and studies the nonsensical pattern of dents scattered across the top of the vent. He doesn't say anything else. 

Safiyah breaks the silence by going back to her stabbing. She brings the screwdriver down again and again,  _clank clank clank._ Dane watches. 

"You could use that on the screws," he points out after a while. Safiyah ignores him and keeps stabbing. The volume of each  _clank_ increases steadily as she applies more force behind the blows. 

"You know your dad will have to pay for this," Dane says. The damage doesn't look too extensive, but any compromised vent poses a danger to the crew. The fines are extensive. That's in the Handbook. 

"I don't care," she replies, and keeps stabbing. Dane lets it happen, because it will give him a break from fixing the lights when he has to repair this eventually.  She sniffs loudly, to prevent more stuff from leaking out of her nose. Dane roots around in his suit's pockets for a thin paper called a Clean-ex and hands it to her. She lifts it to her nose, blows, and tosses it onto the floor beside her. 

After a few more minutes of nothing but clanks and sniffles, Dane asks, "What's so interesting about the vents?"

Safiyah shrugs. "Aliens go in the vents, right?" Dane nods slowly, and she continues, "I'm an alien. I should be allowed to go in the vents."

She's got a point, but "That's not—"

"I'm an  _alien_!" she shouts at him. "Everybody says so! It's—fuck"—she blows her nose again—"it's fucking everywhere! They say don't trust aliens but they never say  _which ones_ and one day they're gonna be talking about  _me_ —"

"Safiyah." Dane tries to make his voice soothing, the kind of voice that kids would like to listen to, but it doesn't seem to affect the kid he's addressing. She snaps her mouth shut and pivots on the floor so that she's facing away from him, staring into the barren room. 

Dane tries again. "Safiyah, Boluzans get along great with humans," he reminds her. He only gets a grunt in response, followed by a sniffle. She's crying again; this definitely isn't what Dane had expected when he entered the repairman's override...

"Why are you still here?" she asks, and it sounds like she's choking on something. Dane starts to get up to help her before he recalls that humans' throats close up when they're sad, this is normal, the child isn't in danger. Well, anyone else would definitely argue that she was in danger just by virtue of being in the same room as Dane,  _the impostor,_ but Dane begs to differ. He likes this small human. She's in more danger from the screwdriver held in her clenched fist than from Dane. 

Why  _is_ he still there? He could've gone to Youssef and Dandria's quarters and woken them up to deal with this. He could've left Safiyah to her own devices and repaired the damage in the morning. He could've done any number of other things. 

"You're crying," he finally says in reply. Safiyah nods, although she's still turned away from him. She cocks her head to one side. 

"What d'you mean?" 

Dane doesn't know, not exactly. But crying means distress and distress is bad and he doesn't want Safiyah to be in distress. So he says so. 

She laughs a little at his simplistic explanation, but she also twists back around to give him a quick smile. Dane bares his teeth back at her, and as he does so, an idea hits him. 

"If you really want to get into the vents, I'll talk to your mom. She—"

Before he can say  _she probably will let you,_ the ECB on his suit's sleeve goes off. The harsh  _wahh wahh_ of the alarm drowns out Dane's voice, and the bright red light strains his eyes after spending so much time in the dimly lit empty room. Safiyah flinches away from the button and presses her hands to her heads to block out the sound. After a moment of fumbling with his glove, Dane squeezes the button to make it stop that obnoxious noise. Safiyah brings her hands down and stares at Dane with wide eyes. 

A dead body has been reported. A corpse. Someone on the crew is  _dead._ Safiyah definitely won't be allowed into the vents now. 

"You better take me to the meeting," she says abruptly. Before Dane can open his mouth to ask why, she explains, "We can be each other's alibi." 

She shouldn't need an alibi. She's half Boluzan, has human-compatible O- blood, grew up on Earth in the city of O'Sacrament (or maybe it was Sacrament-O), lives with a family full of humans. She's the most sympathetic alien on the ship, not that it's much of a competition. 

Still, Dane nods. Not because he wants to be her alibi, but because he needs his own. 

The only problem is, who won't have an alibi during the meeting? As far as Dane knows, he's the only one of his people on board, the only one with any reason to kill anyone else. And he hasn't done anything. His brand of sabatoge is scheduled for the moment the ship docks at HQ, not in the middle of a voyage through newly discovered space, so... who did it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just finished rereading the dark tower series and i am Reeling so i might post a DT fic before the next chapter of this. thanks for reading so far!


	4. The Meeting

The handbook says,  _Refrain from placing blame until a clear understanding of events has been established._

Anila Goyal says, "Where was the body?" and Toulan answers, "Weapons."

"Who..." Anila swallows hard. "Who is it?"

Toulan answers, "Navarro." 

There are gasps at that, followed by a sharp intake of breath from Ibragimova. The green-clad woman reaches blindly for her wife's lime glove and clenches it tightly. Navarro was a nurse, the only other person on the  _Skeld's_ medical staff besides Dr. O'Malley. He was nice. He gave Ibragimova the extra checkups to monitor her radiation levels that her job as a reactor engineer necessitated. And now he's dead. 

Dane has seen dead humans before, even witnessed another of his kind kill a human before, but this feels different. He knew Navarro. Navarro was the one who drew his blood to test for alien cells, and the one who told him that he was all-clear, A-okay, muy bueno. Dane was  _connected_ to Navarro. And now Navarro's dead. 

"There is an impostor among us," Toulan says with a chilling finality. "We must—"

"Oh, shut up."

All heads swivel from Toulan in her white suit with her helmet tucked under her arm over to Muñoz in their brown pajamas, lounging cross-legged on a chair that was definitely not made to be sat on that way. Nobody expected such a blunt interruption from the communications officer. 

Muñoz clearly doesn't care, as they continue, "Don't quote the training simulations at us now. Yeah, yeah, we get it, Estéban's dead and the lights are still out—" everyone briefly glances at Dane before returning their gazes to Muñoz "—and this is a trying time, so can you  _please_ shut up and actually try to, y'know, do your job? Solve the murder?" Mariposa Muñoz leans back in their chair and folds their arms. They glare across the table at Toulan with a hard look in their eye. Dane is  _very_ glad that he's not Toulan, right now. 

Eventually, the security officer breaks off the staring contest (another human concept that Dane does not understand in the slightest) and begins actually conducting the meeting she called. 

"Right. Alibis. Everyone go around, say what you were doing, where you were doing it." This is standard Handbook procedure for these meetings. Dane listens intently to everyone's testimony and mentally prepares for his own. After O'Malley tells everyone that he was watching his cat chase a laser pointer, it's Dane's turn. 

He clears his throat and says, "Safiyah Oulehri and I were in the cyan quarters." 

"Yeah!" the child pipes up, "I was with Mr. Dane the whole time. We were talking and then the alarm went off."

Youssef looks puzzled. "Why were you in there in the first place, either of you?" he asks, and Dane answers this question even though it wasn't directed at him because he doesn't want Safiyah to mention the vents just yet. The vents are a bit of a 'hot' subject during these meetings. 

"I thought the gravity malfunctioned inside the room," he explains. "But it was just Safiyah making noise. That's all."

Dandria starts to ask her own question, but Toulan talks over her as she explains that no one will be ejected into space this time. "We're about four days out from HQ," she reminds everyone. "They have better detection equipment than we do. We'll just stay alert during the rest of this trip and get everyone tested when we land, is that clear? No ejections."

-

Toulan's 'stay alert' plan seems to be working so far. No more dead bodies have been reported, no emergency meetings called, no systems sabatoged. Dane finishes with the lights, and the two pilots, Dandria and Raushan, take the ship on a slight detour to catch a glimpse of the famous River Nebula. Nobody speaks during meals as the  _Skeld_ passes the nebula. They're too enthralled by its glittering gasses and colorful dust clouds to say anything. 

Dane thinks the nebula is beautiful, but he finds it hard to appreciate its beauty because he's so dang  _itchy._ Holding one form for this long, several weeks, is simply not what his molecules are meant to do. He needs to change, to shift his shape, but he can't. Everywhere he looks is humans humans humans, and one half-Boluzan. Oh, and the nebula out the window. It could be home to any number of life forms but Dane will never change into any of them because then he'd be too  _ alien .  _

And this tall man with the big nose is so  itchy.  Holding this form for a little while longer won't actually hurt Dane, but it's so uncomfortable. It feels wrong.  Stagnant . It's hard to think clearly when his very synapses don't want to be there. He would give anything to jettison his human central nervous system for a few hours. 

Not only does he have to battle the urge to shift his shape, he's also got his job—his real job, not the engineer/electrician gig that he somehow weaseled into at the last minute—to worry about. He has to rig god knows how many (listen to him, invoking a human deity) explosives along the ventilation shafts and prime them to go off the moment the cargo bay is emptied. Something about the  _Skeld_ carrying dangerous chemicals, or maybe a prototype scanner that actually has the potential to weed out Dane's people; something along those lines. Dane wasn't really paying attention when he'd been given the assignment. 

Whatever's in storage is dangerous to him, and that's all Dane needs to know. All he has to do is make sure that the humans never learn how dangerous it is. And for that to work, he has to make the explosion look like an accident, and not an act of deliberate sabatoge. He hates sabatoge anyway. It's so pointless; takes only minutes to repair while the resulting paranoia lasts for weeks and makes it hard to pass unscrutinized. 

At least, in past voyages this was all true. Now, all Dane wants to do is conveniently forget to rig the ship and just get out of there after they dock. He's  _connected_ to the humans this time, not just some reclusive guy who hangs in Electrical for the entire voyage. They like him, for some reason. And for once, he's not the only alien on board. Or, apparently, the only impostor. 


	5. The Betting Pool

The Handbook probably has rules against betting on who's the impostor, but it's been years since Raushan read it. What she has read, several times today, is the crew roster. Muñoz had a copy sitting around in Communications, and since Muñoz is keeping track of the betting pool, well...

Raushan Zhumbaev (spelled Jumbaev on the sheet, but she likes the digraph better) gives the list a glance over for the umpteenth time and sighs. Literally anyone could be an alien. Except for Navarro, since he's, well, dead. She'd also be reluctant to bet on Kanchana, the weapons specialist, since anybody with unfettered access to the ship's blasters gets checked and double-checked and psychologically prodded all over before they're allowed to board. Kanchana is safe. 

To be honest, Raushan's halfway leaning towards Muñoz as a potential candidate. They keep making comments about Toulan's lack of investigate abilities, looking very smug while they do so. Like they know something the security officer doesn't. In the words of the kids back on Earth who play the training simulations, Brown is sus. 

-

Youssef doesn't think that Toulan is the impostor, but he's put his money on her anyway, just to see her face when she reads the spreadsheet and realizes. Toulan hates aliens with a passion, and Youssef, having an alien child, hates Toulan in return. 

-

Muñoz bet on Thomas O'Malley because it seemed funny at the time. They know they're going to lose money when the real murderer is revealed (they have a half-baked theory as to who it  _really_ is, but it's not like they're going to just accuse someone out of nowhere), but it's just too funny. Imagine, a shapeshifting alien with the ability to be the hottest person in the universe deciding to just be an orange cat instead. And the cat  _does_ try to get into the vents, so...

-

"Who do you  _really_ think it is? I mean, you don't actually think it's Roy's cat, do you?" 

Muñoz just shrugs. Ibragimova seems trustworthy enough, but she's been hanging around Comms quite a bit lately. Won't say what for. Muñoz thinks she might be trying to get a look at the complete betting list, find out who suspects whom of being the impostor. Why go to all that trouble when she could just ask, unless she doesn't want to be caught asking... 

"I dunno," they answer at last, "but what about you? Why haven't you placed a bet yet?"

"I don't know who I'd bet on," Ibragimova says. Muñoz nods thoughtfully as she continues, "I was always rubbish at the simulations. And this is only my second voyage, so—"

"—You're banking on the rest of us to get you through, safe and sound," Muñoz interrupts, though not unkindly. They sound amused, more than anything. Ibragimova is suddenly very aware of how much gray dominates the Comms officer's close-cropped hair. How many bodies have they reported; how many crewmates have they pushed out of the airlock? 

Muñoz claps Ibragimova on the shoulder with a strained smile, like they can tell what she's thinking. "I've seen all this before," they remind her, "and I'll tell you a secret: nobody else is gonna die. The killer waited too long to start, and now everybody's on red alert all the damn time. Can't sneeze too loud, 'cause somebody'll jump and hit the emergency button. Relax, Green. You'll be fine."

_Empty words,_ their mind sing-songs at them, which they ignore. They don't think Ibragimova is the murderer; there's a more likely candidate, in a lighter spacesuit. Muñoz gives the reactor engineer one last pat on the shoulder before they shoo her out of their station and back towards the cafeteria. 

-

Estelle doesn't spend her days in Electrical anymore. The small, purple-clad girl passes the time in the corner of Sre. Muñoz's Comms room now, slowly covering one wall in crayon-and-marker drawings. Sre. Muñoz knows all about communicating, so Estelle likes talking to them. They tell her about alien languages, and she starts adding alien alphabets to her pictures; a Boluzan speech bubble here, a Zabsarese street sign there. 

When Sre. Muñoz isn't teaching Estelle about languages or doing their actual official professional work, they're usually listening to music. Most of it's in other languages, from both Earth and off-world bands. Estelle can't understand many of the words, but she likes most of Sre. Muñoz's tunes. One day, during lunch, she tells Jade Toulan about the music, and Jade's eyes widen and she runs over to her aunt and asks if she can spend the afternoon in Communications.

Officer Toulan says yes. Jade follows Estelle and Sre. Muñoz back to Comms after lunch, and Jade almost slaps Estelle in the face with her flapping hands after she enters the room. From their usual seat in front of the array of monitors, Sre. Muñoz asks Jade if she has any musical requests. 

Jade asks for something in the hop-hip genre—totally distinct from Earth's hip-hop, just a translation coincidence—and Muñoz grins and clicks the first option on the search function. As the first disjointed notes begin to pour forth from the mismatched set of speakers, the communications officer smiles. The murder seems so far away when these kids are around. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> has anyone seen the movie Mud (2013). has anyone seen Mud. i'm desperate. i have matthew mcconaughey brain rot. send help. thanks for continuing to read!


	6. The Reveal

The Handbook has two whole chapters about how to identify and get rid of an impostor. It has zero chapters about how to communicate with one. Hundreds of words about the mechanics of the airlock, the proper use of the ECB's, the telltale signs of a shapeshifter... nothing about negotiating with them. 

Muñoz read the Handbook back when they were a trainee, just like everyone else—well, everyone except Raushan, and she still knows the gist of it. Crewmates don't talk to the impostor. They don't  _communicate_ with them. Muñoz, being a communications officer, thinks that's a load of shit, and probably the reason why MIRA's supposed 'sabatoge prevention strategy' is so ineffective. 

Everyone's been taught to eject first, ask questions later. But Muñoz has a lot of questions. 

-

Dane may not actually have a circadian rhythm, but he still doesn't appreciate being 'woken' in the middle of the night. Don't humans have rules against this kind of thing? The supposedly unspoken rules that socializing happens during the day, when everyone's awake. 

Whoever just knocked on the door to Dane's quarters obviously doesn't care about this custom. He thinks he should recognize the distinctive knocknocktap rhythm of glove on metal, but he can't remember which crewmate always drums on the table like that during meals because he's just woken up. His uninvited guest doesn't seem to be deterred by his lack of response. The quick pattern of knocks comes again. 

Dane makes sure all his limbs are in all the right places and his face still looks human before he opens the door to get rid of whoever it is. Could be O'Malley asking for help getting his cat out of the vents again (O'Malley really lucked out with his quarters, he's got a window in his door so he can see who's come to visit), or one of the other engineers—probably Youssef, since Ibragimova doesn't really talk to Dane much—wanting some help. Could be a glitch in the speakers in the hallway. Dane won't know until he answers the door. 

It's Muñoz. 

While Dane stands there, too surprised to do anything besides stare at them, the Communications officer brushes past him and enters his quarters. Dane spins around to continue staring, because he just can't quite believe this. What the hell (humans have incredibly useful religious expressions, he's learning) are they doing here, in the middle of the night?

Well, 'middle of the night' is relative, since there's no star to base the ship's day/night cycle on, but he digresses. That's not important. What's important is finding out what the hell (honestly,  _such_ a useful phrase) Muñoz wants to say to him at this hour, and why they've come to his quarters to say it. 

"Why haven't you killed anyone?" 

Dane stands frozen in his doorway, staring at the Comms officer in shock. In the middle of the small room, Muñoz folds their arms and stares right back at Dane the engineer the electrician the  _impostor_ _._ They stare at him, knowing that he's an alien, he's a shapeshifter, he's on this ship solely to cause trouble, and they  smile at him. 

"Tough question, sorry. Hm, how about this: does your mission require any murder in the first place?" 

Dane can't move. A combination of shock, dread, and confusion has him rooted to the spot, standing with the door open behind him and his pajama-clad ass facing the corridor. Muñoz walks back over to him, claps their hand on his shoulder (they have to extend their limb quite high in order to reach him, but they don't seem to mind), and closes the door for him. The soft  _click_ of the automatic lock engaging snaps Dane out of his trance, and he lets out a breath that he hadn't given his itchy lungs permission to inhale in the first place. 

"No," he finally says, in response to the second question. "No murder."

"Great," Muñoz sighs, "so it's not you. I was hoping it wasn't you." Is that why they're here? To determine if Dane is the impostor? No... they already know that he has some kind of outside orders; they don't know the specifics, but they know he's an alien. An impostor. And, for some reason, they seem fine with it.

Dane should probably say something. "How did you know?" he asks. He should definitely find this out, so he can become better at avoiding detection in the future. Muñoz snorts and waves their hand dismissively. 

"Just had a hunch, y'know. Also, you– hang on, can I sit down? My knee's been acting up lately." Dane nods, and they take a seat on the metal toolbox next to his desk. They continue, "Just a tip, that stunt with the lights was a little extreme. And volunteering to fix it... whew! Back at HQ, they would've ejected you weeks ago."

Hm. Good to know. Although...

"I didn't break the lights," Dane clarifies, "that really was from passing through that cloud. It would've been even more suspicious if I hadn't repaired them, don't you think?"

Muñoz shrugs. "Yeah, I guess you're right." 

Being found out is nothing like how Dane imagined it. He always thought it would happen during a meeting, where an exceptionally observant crew member would poke a hole in his alibi and convince everyone to throw him out of the airlock. He never imagined the accusation coming from a friendly face. Although, Muñoz doesn't seem to actually be accusing him of anything other than having really bad luck. 

"Are you going to tell the others?" 

"Why would I?" Muñoz sounds surprised, like the thought hasn't even crossed their mind until Dane asked them. "We're supposed to be on the lookout for the  _murderer_ _,_ right?" Dane nods, and they explain, "So, since you haven't killed anybody, that's not you, is it?"

"Do you think I'd tell you if I had? Murdered somebody, that is?"

Muñoz chuckles. "I'd know. Trust me. No offense, but you're too damn nervous right now to sell me a lie." 

They're right about this. Dane's chest feels... tight, somehow, like each organ has shrunk down in order to make room for the fear of getting ejected. The possibility of lying to Muñoz never even entered his mind until they brought it up themself. He's not sure what that says about his self-preservation. If they had accused him of killing Navarro...

But they didn't do that. And now, they're talking to him just like they always have, like they're just two human members of the crew having a chat. Like one of the two hasn't just admitted to being the 'enemy'. It's weird, having a human know what he is, but, surprisingly, it's not all bad. 

"I have so many questions for you," Muñoz tells him. "If I may?"

Dane nods. 

"Alright, first off, why choose that face? I mean, feel free to take this the wrong way, but you look like an Australian version of Jason Momoa."

Dane doesn't know what half of those words mean. "Who's that?"

"Oh, an actor from pre-contact days. You kinda look like him, except more white, and more Australian..."

"Australian?"

"Your accent?" Muñoz says, raising their voice to make it a half-question. "That's where your accent's from, right?"

"I don't know..."

Muñoz blows a long sigh out of their mouth. "Okay. Um, get a tablet out, I'll show you where it is." It takes a minute, but Dane manages to find the device he's been using to test out different transmission frequencies. He hands it over to Muñoz, who quickly pulls up a map of the Earth. It's very blue. 

"Okay, this is Guatemala, where I'm from; this island over here is Australia—"

"It's red."

"Yeah, it's mostly desert. Anyway, that's Australia, and then there's six other continents..."


	7. The Sabatoge

"Any idea why the Comms monitors keep shorting out?" 

"Nope. Hit me."

Anila slides a card across the table, and her husband Jagraj sighs in defeat. "I can't do it, babe. Make me proud, Gulnur," he says, giving the green-clad woman a slap on the back as he scoots away from their game of Blackjack. Ibragimova gives him a nervous smile and asks for another card, which Anila provides. She's got a good hand, now. 

"Yay!" 

Anila grins at the other two and says, "But, seriously, why are all of Muñoz's screens suddenly not working? Could it be sabatoge?"

"Pfft." At the neighboring cafeteria table, Kanchana Nitpattanasai, the  _Skeld's_ weapons specialist, scoffs at the conversation happening next to her. "No way. I think the postie got cold feet after it killed Estéban." 

"You think they have emotions?" Jagraj asks her. "You think they can _get_ cold feet?" This has been a point of contention in xenobiologist circles for decades, ever since the creatures started attacking human ships. 

"Yeah, I do think so," Kanchana replies, folding her arms as if daring any of them to contest that claim. Anila doesn't intend to do anything of the sort. The weapons specialist is a short woman, but she's very intimidating—physically strong, with shiny silver eyeliner that looks as sharp as the knives she's allowed to carry on the belt of her specially armored spacesuit. 

At the table closest to the Admin hallway, Dane and Muñoz are huddled together over a tablet, probably trying to figure out what's been causing the electrical problems in Communications. They make an odd pair, Anila thinks, but they also seem to compliment one another, both in appearance and personality. Dane's at least six feet tall, probably more, and built like a brick shithouse, but he's pretty quiet. Well, maybe quiet isn't the right word for it, but he's nice. Anila knows he's been on a few previous voyages, but he always seems pleasantly surprised whenever anyone interacts with him. Muñoz, on the other hand, is short, wiry, and very outgoing, if a little brusque at times. The two of them make a good, if odd, pair. 

-

"You're breaking the monitors on purpose!" Dane exclaims indignantly, holding two neatly separated wires up in Muñoz's face. "Do you see? I can tell someone's cut them!"

"I swear to god, Dane, I haven't  _touched_ those damn wires—"

"Am I interrupting?" 

Ibragimova's voice cuts cleanly into Muñoz and Dane's argument. The two spin around to face the doorway at the same time, both wearing identical expressions of surprise. Muñoz's face quickly shifts into a light frown, while Dane drops the two dangling wires he's been holding. 

"What's up, Green?" Muñoz asks, stepping forward in the reactor engineer's direction. 

Ibragimova clears her throat and says, "Um, I need to talk to you, actually." She points at Dane, who nods at her to acknowledge the request. He quickly reattaches the two wires and looks back up, giving her his full attention. Muñoz starts hitting buttons on their console, evidently trying to see if the repairs have worked. They have, so there's no reason for Dane to stay. Ibragimova explains to him that some of the reactor's diagnostic panels won't turn on. 

Dane's reaction to this is strange. He starts asking if she's smelled anything strange in the reactor chamber in the past few days, if she's heard any "scuttling noises" (Ibragimova does not know what this means) in the ceiling or floor, or if the still-operational panels have turned a "weird color." She says no to all three questions. 

"Why's that matter?" the reactor engineer asks him. "It's just a display malfunction, I think."

"Yeah," Dane mutters to himself, " _think_ ." His easygoing, here-to-help smile vanishes for a moment, and he goes quiet. Muñoz elbows him. 

"Sorry! Sometimes the, uh, signs I asked you about can mean there was an inexperienced sabatoge attempt," he explains. 

Ibragimova frowns. "How do you know it's from lack of experience?" 

Dane's eyes widen briefly (in panic? no... surprise?) before he shrugs and begins packing up his small toolbox. "Well, they can't be very good at it, can they? If they're leaving signs like that all over the place."

_Seems legit_ . Ibragimova mirrors Dane's shrug and leads the way to the reactor chamber, pausing to wave goodbye to Muñoz on the way out. The corridors of the  _Skeld_ aren't very crowded at this time of day, so the trip between Communications and the reactor chamber takes almost no time at all. In less than a minute, Dane's dismantled the offending panels and located the issue with a soft "Aha!"

"What is it?"

He shines his little flashlight on two dull metal knobs. "These should be insulated," he explains, and Ibragimova gasps as she realizes what exactly the problem is. Her maintenance training course only made a small footnote of this, given how unlikely it is, but she definitely remembers the Sapite-Welken Sabatoge Hypothesis. 

Dane's already explaining it to her, although he doesn't seem to know that there's a specific name for the problem. "See, the displays not working was just to distract us and make us think that the problem's easy to fix. But really, the insulation for these knobs here can be used to get into all kinds of things. They could even hack the weapons array, if they really tried."

"I know," Ibragimova says, somewhat apologetically. "This  _is_ my job... Well, for now, at least. Sorry, you can go on."

Dane shakes his head. "No, I'm sorry. I think I'm just used to talking everyone else—mostly Muñoz—through everything." That makes sense, Ibragimova supposes; Muñoz isn't exactly the most mechanically minded member of the crew. Their area of expertise is words, not schematics and circuits. Speaking of words...

"—Need to tell Kanchana," Dane's musing, halfway under his breath. He's right, they definitely need to report these missing components to Toulan and Kanchana as soon as possible. 

"I could go tell them," Ibragimova offers, "while you fix the panels?"

"Yeah, good idea. Oh, can you go to Electrical and tell Safiyah that I'll be back soon, please?"

"Of course. See you later." Dane gives her a halfhearted wave and gets to work threading neighboring wires around the uninsulated knobs, trying to bypass their function so that he can turn them off for the time being. Ibragimova leaves him to his work and steps out into the hallway. Dane can hear her humming to herself as she walks away. 

Minutes later, the ECB on his wrist goes off. 


	8. The Summons

Another report, another meeting, another bloody scene—except this time, there's not another dead body. 

Raushan, the Lime pilot, was found laying unconscious, not dead, in the O2 room. Dandria, her copilot, called the meeting. Everyone filed into the cafeteria quietly, not frantically like the first time. 

And, just like the first time, the meeting has accomplished absolutely nothing. When Toulan  _should_ have been trying to identify the murderer, she talked about sticking together and letting HQ handle it. Muñoz almost left the meeting outright when the security officer started quoting the Handbook. Again. 

Muñoz is back in their office now, along with Estelle and Jade. Raushan has O'Malley taking care of her in the medbay, and she's been excused from her duties for the rest of the voyage. One whole day of rest and relaxation. No word on whether she'll be allowed to continue recuperating after they reach HQ, which is, in Muñoz's humble opinion, totally ridiculous. 

They sigh. This whole situation is just fucked beyond belief. Two crew members dead... and no doubt when the  _Skeld_ arrives at HQ and the crew all get tested, Dane'll be the one they blame. Dane will have to take the blame, and the real murderer will walk free, unless they also trip the shapeshifter alarm. Somehow, Muñoz doesn't think that'll happen. Seems like it would be a bad idea to give someone a murder mission on a ship destined to dock at a facility with such advanced detection techniques. 

Wait. Yeah, it  _would_ be an awful idea to put any kind of operative on a ship bound for such a highly sophisticated facility as HQ. The shapeshifters must know that they can be detected... They must know  _something_ about MIRA's capabilities, must've gotten their hands on a research paper or something by now... But the shapeshifters put Dane on the  _Skeld_ _,_ on a voyage to HQ, didn't they? So, logically, that would imply...

Muñoz swallows. They shouldn't care this much about a shapeshifter, dammit. An alien. Not from Earth, not even from the Milky Way galaxy at all, or so MIRA's xenobiologists would have everyone believe. Some even speculate that the shapeshifters don't have a home planet, that they simply drifted throughout the cosmos until they discovered humanoids and began killing them. 

Well, they probably got a few lessons in killing from the humanoids themselves. Muñoz remembers sitting in history class as a kid, paging through their textbook and wondering why humans liked to fight each other so much. They wondered why half of the class was just memorizing dates and locations of important battles of the World Wars, or the Latin American Revolutionary Wars, or the Guatemalan Civil War, or or or... 

_Does Dane know about any of that?_ they wonder.  _ Probably not, the guy didn't even know where his own  accent was from until I showed him. God, what if he has to answer some kind of basic Earth trivia questions at HQ? They do that when the scanners are down, I know that...  _

A flashing white square on one of the screens catches their attention, and cuts off their train of thought. Muñoz clicks on the dot twice, the standard move to acknowledge any signal. The square disappears, and a smaller red dot takes it place, flashing more quickly than the square... It's flashing like an ECB. 

Muñoz turns this over in their mind. Flashing white square, red ECB, white, red, white, red, white, ECB. Is this from Toulan? Does she want to talk to Muñoz about the murders? 

A quick scan reveals that the message did indeed come from the data screen in Security.  _Still might not be Toulan,_ Muñoz thinks.  _She's hardly one for subtle investigations._

Still, it'll look incredibly suspicious if Muñoz just outright ignores the security officer's apparent summons. They glance back at the two kids in the back of their office and frown. Somebody will have to be in here while Muñoz is gone; they can't just leave the girls alone for who knows how long... Or they could simply wait until the end of their shift. Yeah, that seems like a better idea.


	9. The Toolbox

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gonna go ahead and request feedback up front, because i'm just gonna rant in the end notes. enjoy!

Jade feels hungry. She's in bed, across the room from Aunt Edith, and she wants to get out of bed and sneak away to the cafeteria to eat some cheese but she can't. It's three in the morning, according to the blinking yellow clock that Aunt Edith insists stays on at all times. Jade still isn't used to falling asleep with such a bright light in the room. 

Jade's not tired. She fell asleep in Muñoz's communications office and slept through dinner. The Comms officer only woke her back up when their shift ended and they were about to power off the monitors. Jade walked back to her aunt's quarters and got scolded for being so late, and ever since then she's been in bed. 

Her aunt took away her headphones as a punishment. Jade can hear the pipes rattling throughout the ship, the hiss of the vents, the indistinct hum of chatter from the neighboring quarters, the occasional whooshing noise whenever the engines kick up a notch.... All of it. There's no way she can sleep now. 

And she's hungry. She hasn't eaten since lunch, and she spent the whole meal talking to Stella so she didn't eat much, just a whole jalapeño pepper and a piece of bread with hot mustard on it. She likes spicy food. 

If Aunt Edith wasn't in the room, Jade would just leave and go to cafeteria anyway. She's only going to be on the ship for one more day. It doesn't matter how mad her aunt gets, since Jade will be away from her once the  _Skeld_ reaches the MIRA headquarters. But Aunt Edith  _is_ in the room, and she's a light sleeper. She'll hear the door's noises and wake up and get mad and then Jade will get locked in their quarters for the rest of the voyage. 

Jade doesn't want that, so she just lies awake, feeling like her stomach is about to start digesting itself like Frank O'Malley said it could. Xir dad is the ship's doctor, so that must be true. 

She's not tired, not really, but it's very hard to just lie awake staring at the ceiling without dozing a little. Jade lets her eyes close, just for a second, and the next thing she's aware of is Aunt Edith opening the door and leaving. Maybe it's a good thing that she doesn't have her headphones. She never would've heard the door unlocking with them on. 

Underneath the sounds of vents and neighbors and pipes and engines, Jade can hear her aunt's footsteps receding down the corridor. She's headed towards her office, it sounds like. Jade rolls over in her bed and tries to fall back asleep despite her protesting stomach. If Aunt Edith comes back and Jade isn't there, she'll get punished. If she runs into Aunt Edith in the corridors, she'll get punished. Sneaking out while her aunt has the night shift is different from sneaking out while her aunt seems to be doing the same. It's unpredictable, and Jade could get punished for predicting the wrong thing. 

So she stays in bed, staring out the window now instead of up at the ceiling. She tries to measure the time passing in her head, but she gives up after three minutes. The clock will do. 

The clock tells her it's been twenty minutes since Aunt Edith left. Jade's stomach growls. 

Twenty-five. The  _Skeld_ passes a small cluster of metallic asteroids that glint in the light of the nearest star. Jade's mouth tastes like nothing but her own saliva. 

Twenty-nine. Something rattles and meows in the vents. Frank's cat's gotten lose again. Jade wonders what kind of food the animal gets. 

Thirty-three. Jade's stomach growls again. She gets out of bed. She doesn't look out the window at the passing stars. 

Thirty-four. Jade pushes the door open just a crack, to listen for footsteps in the corridor. There's no one. 

Thirty-five. Jade darts out of the room and books it towards the cafeteria, hoping and praying that her aunt did indeed go to the security office instead of going on patrol. Every single patrol pattern crosses the cafeteria at some point. 

She can't see the clock anymore. The cafeteria is almost totally dark, apart from the sky out the window and the glowing buttons beside each door leading to different parts of the ship. It's very peaceful, and Jade would love to think about liminal spaces for a while, but she's hungry and that's what she's here for. 

She walks over to the food storage and takes out some dehydrated strawberries. Without bothering to rehydrate the fruit, she shoves a handful into her mouth, chews quickly, and swallows. There, that should be enough. She washes the strawberries down with a mouthful of the iced tea that Estelle's mom brought on board. It tastes like peaches. 

_Clunk._ Something in the corner of the cafeteria makes a noise, and Jade swivels her head around to stare. The sound wasn't particularly loud, but to Jade, it sounded like a woodpecker drilling into a tree in search of food, if the tree was her head and the woodpecker made clunking noises instead of  _taptaptaptaptap._ That's weird. She's never heard that noise before. 

Jade walks over to the place where the clunk came from. It looks like a bare corner of the room, not really useful for much except just existing as part of the spaceship. It doesn't look like the kind of place that makes noises at night for no reason, but what does Jade know. She's only eleven. 

Something else clunks, inside the vent that opens into the corner.  _Something is in the vents,_ Jade realizes. She recalls the audio version of the MIRA handbook that her aunt gave her a few weeks ago. The Handbook has a section on 'ventilation intrusions', and it's all about what to do if there's a weird noise or smell or anything coming from the vents. Well, clunking and clanging and clinking definitely count as weird noises. Jade knocks quietly on the vent's entrance to see what will happen. That's not the Handbook's procedure, but it'll be more interesting. 

"Fuck oooooooo," a voice inside the vent says, followed by the sound of someone hitting their head on a metal wall. The knock startled them. Jade knocks again, just to see what will happen. 

"Ooooooo," the voice says again, and knocks back. The long, drawn-out vowel seems to linger in the air for a few seconds, trying to worm its way into Jade's ears. She really wishes she had her headphones right now. 

Instead of more clunks and clinks, some squelch-y and crackling noises come from the vent before it abruptly pops open. Jade barely has time to register that there's a person in the vents before that person clambers out of the shaft, closes the hatch, and slaps their hand over her mouth, probably to stop her from screaming. Which is good, for the vent person, because Jade  definitely would've screamed before she recognized them. 

Mr. Dane looks pretty close to screaming himself. His eyes are blown wide open, dark brown dots in a pale face dripping with sweat.  _The vent must be hot,_ Jade notes to herself.  _Either that, or he's been down there for a_ really _long time._ Mr. Dane doesn't have his suit on, which is weird because the Handbook  definitely says that protection is required for people working in the vents. And what's he actually working on? She can't see his toolbox anywhere, and nothing's gone wrong with the ship's air circulation as far as Jade can tell...

And he's still covering her mouth with his big sweaty hand. Jade scoots backward on the cafeteria floor, putting about three feet of distance between the two of them. Mr. Dane tries to follow, but evidently thinks better of it and stays where he is. 

"What were you doing?" Jade asks. Her voice doesn't shake nearly as much as she thought it would, which is good because Mr. Dane looks terrified of her question and that can't be a good sign, can it? 

He doesn't answer, just turns around and snaps the lid closed on a small box that Jade hasn't even noticed until now. It's the shape and size of a spiral notebook, made out of a shiny green metal Jade's never seen before. There's no seam, so she can't figure out how Mr. Dane closed it in the first place, but she definitely saw him do  something to it that made a sound like slamming down a wooden box lid.  _But it's made of metal,_ she argues with herself,  _so why did it sound like wood?_

Good question. Maybe he'll answer this one. "What's that box made out of?" she asks, and points at it with her elbow because her aunt always yells at her for being rude and 'pointing fingers'. Mr. Dane doesn't look back at it. 

He clears his throat, loudly. "It... it's, uh," he begins, and then falls silent. He clears his throat again and again, each time rising in volume, but he still looks frustrated. No, annoyed. No,  _tired,_ he looks tired, like this has happened before and he still doesn't know what to do. He shakes his head aggressively and clears his throat one more time before continuing. "It's my tools," he explains. Jade shakes her head back at him. 

"That's not your normal toolbox."

"...I don't keep vent tools in that one," Mr. Dane replies. He sounds  _very_ scared. Like, more scared of Jade than she is of the fact that there's probably an impostor right in front of her. 

"You don't need any special tools to fix the vents," Jade counters. "It says so in the Handbook. I've listened to it."

"I... Look, this isn't important. I've got things to finish up—"

"The emergency button is right there," Jade says quietly, pointing (with her finger this time) to the central table. His face turns even whiter and his breathing quickens. Jade feels bad for making him scared, except she doesn't  _actually_ feel bad for him because he's just a disguise, right? Mr. Dane is a disguise for an alien. He's an impostor, a shapeshifter; he must be. She only feels bad because his disguise is so good at making faces. 

"Jade, please don't," Mr. Dane says. He's already halfway back inside the vent, and the weird wood-metal box is nowhere to be seen. His face still looks human. Jade wishes he would just stop pretending. She watches him slide completely into the shaft, and then watches the gaping hole in the floor until her eyes water and she has to blink and look away. 

She stands up slowly. She dusts herself off. She puts away the empty cup that had held her iced tea. She looks back at the vent-hole—still there, still empty. 

She presses the emergency button. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOOOO BOY oh my fucking god! what a fucking week huh guys! i was gonna post this on monday but then i noticed several huge continuity errors, so i fixed them, but then i had to focus on a damn court mandated essay (long story, i caused a collision back in october and in addition to paying a citation fee i had to write a 1000 word essay on the merits of defensive driving. i made sure the essay was as difficult to read as i could possibly make it, without actually committing any grammar errors. anyway) and THEN after i sent the court essay in i was like "yeah! i will write for fun now!" and THEN the MAGA maggots went full mask-off white supremacist fascism mode (with a dash of christian extremism, we can't forget the christian extremism) and i just. yeah. long week. did i mention that israel bombed syria again while we were all distracted by trump's terrorists? yeah. super long week. 
> 
> hope everyone reading this stayed safe, especially if you're located near any of the areas affected. and, just in case, this is an official statement that any racists reading this can get fucked and perish


	10. noooo don't eject me ur so sexy haha

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my secret to guilt free cliffhangers is never establishing an update schedule. enjoy this

"—the hell?"

"—middle of the damn night—"

" You try telling your nephews you can't call 'em for another five weeks 'cause some idiot hit the button—"

"—gotta be an accident, right, I mean—"

"—middle of the damn  _night!"_

"—got bodily fluids all over me and my wife, because it startled me, y'know—"

"—just when the meds kick in WHAM! Fuckin' ECB goes off—"

"If we got another body I swear to god—"

"—less than ten hours from HQ! I can't believe—"

"It's the middle of the god damn night!"

"—honestly, just leave it, HQ can sort out whatever new shit—"

"—yeah, and I'm just about to finally put it in when my suit starts goin' off—"

"IT'S THE MIDDLE—"

"—of the night, yes, I think we all know that by now—"

"Shut up, guys, this is a meeting!"

"—just covered in, uh, white fluid—"

"Quiet!" 

Everyone looks over at Jade, pauses briefly, and starts yelling all over again. 

"—see, a fuckin kid hit the button on accident, you guys can't possibly—"

"—wanna talk to my sister's kids but apparently I can't—"

"—spit on 'em! It's totally spit, totally came from my mouth, no other orifices—"

"—makes you wonder if that pro-surveillance nut job was right... I mean, we gotta put some kinda lock on these buttons—"

"—about to go leave and wash my sheets out—"

"IT IS THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT!"

"We know!"

-

"Let's go over what happened one more time."

Jade groans. "I  _told_ you! I got hungry, I went in here, and I heard Mr. Dane in the vents! You guys haven't even checked the administration monitor to find out where he went afterward. The Handbook  says you're supposed to use everything—"

"Be quiet," Aunt Edith interrupts, pushing Jade to the side so she can stand at the head of the table. She shoots her niece a warning glare before she says, "Hogan, go check the admin log."

The circle parts to let Estelle's mom out, and she leaves, headed for admin at a light jog. Everyone watches her go until the cafeteria doors hiss closed behind her, obscuring her purple pajamas from view.

Jade watches while Aunt Edith grills her fellow crewmates, demanding copies of the night shift duty roster and asking each family unit in turn if they're  _sure_ they heard their neighbors making noise before the alarm went off. Everyone's alibi checks out, except for Mr. Dane's, because he's not at the meeting and can't give an alibi in the first place. 

Everyone feels his absence. The empty space between Muñoz and Ibragimova practically screams "there should be a person here!" and Dane's bright red helmet is missing from the colorful sea of metal on a neighboring table. Black, white, green, brown, orange, yellow, lime, cyan, purple, blue, and the absence of red, the negative image of his helmet. He hardly ever wears it anyways. _Was that supposed to make us trust him?_

-

Toulan ambushes Dane in the lower engine after the meeting ends. He should've known it would come down to her; her niece reported him, after all. Trusting those human kids was stupid. A lapse in judgement. He wishes the human brain didn't have such a hyperactive amygdala, because his own won't stop pumping out emotions faster than he can handle them. He's angry at himself and he's angry at Jade and he's angry at MIRA and he's angry at Toulan and he's angry at his fellow shifters... But he's also sad, and stressed out, and confused. He  _hates_ having an amygdala. 

Toulan marches him down the hall into the cafeteria, where everyone else has gathered. This won't be a typical ejection, and everyone knows it. Impostors don't connect themselves to the crew like this. The Handbook doesn't have a chapter on how to throw your friend, the impostor, out of an airlock. 

Sure, there's a few short chapters on coming to terms with the wrongful ejection of a crewmate, and endless chapters on notifying families of a relative's death-by-impostor, but there's nothing about befriending the actual impostor. There's not a single subheading titled 'what to do when you  know you're ejecting the impostor, but the impostor is also your friend'. 

Toulan charges him with murder and sabotage, and Dane shakes his head. "Just sabatoge," he says, knowing that his words won't be believed anymore. His alibi for Navarro's murder was just a kid, an alien kid at that, and he didn't even  have a proper one for Raushan's attack. And he knows, from Muñoz, that his explanation for the situation with the lights is 'flimsy' and 'hard to buy'. Speaking of Muñoz...

"Hey, every— Hey!" they shout, clapping their hands to quiet the room once more. When they're certain that everyone's attention has focused on them, they continue. "Thanks. So, yeah, Dixon's a shapeshifter, wow, what a surprise. Old news. Now, we still need to find out who killed Navarro."

Silence follows their suggestion, and they sigh. "Come on, guys," they say, rubbing their forehead with one hand, "do you really think Dane's committed homicide? I mean, look at him right now. He's scared just thinking about it."

Dane knows he's making a face. Another side effect of the whole amygdala thing. He can't help it, he just hates thinking about Navarro's death. He thought, signing up, that this would be a bloodless voyage, but apparently someone else had other ideas. He thought that, for once, everyone on board the ship would arrive at their destination in one piece, except for the ship itself. (Herself? Human languages have such complicated rules about gendered pronouns.) 

Jagraj squints at Dane with suspicion in his eyes. "How do you know he's not just faking?"

This is what Dane's always been afraid of, ever since he first took a human form; this accusation, being told he's just pretending to have emotions. Please. Like he would waste a perfectly good limbic system. Jagraj doesn't know it (or maybe he does, and just doesn't care) but he's hit a nerve. 

"I'm not faking," Dane argues. "Do you think I spent all this time maintaining my brain just for fun?"

"See! He's a shapeshifter, he just said so!" 

Muñoz sighs. "Way ahead of ya there, amigo. He's a shifter, but he's not a murderer. Ergo," they say, raising their voice to make sure everyone understands, "we should not eject him. Okay?"

Dane breathes in, preparing to let out a sigh of relief, but Toulan challenges Muñoz before he has a chance to speak. "We eject for sabatoge, too," she reminds the gathering, and Dane feels his (very well-formed, honestly, with four chambers and everything) heart sink when a few people nod to themselves. When humans say that their heart sank, they mean it metaphorically, but in Dane's case the organ has literally sunken a few inches into the place his left lung was just moments before. It's not comfortable, and he knows he's making a new face and he knows that  _pained_ can sometimes look like  _guilty_ _,_ but human hearts generally aren't supposed to be where his is right now and it hurts. 

Toulan notices the change in Dane's expression and jumps on the opportunity it presents her with. "I can't prove that you killed Navarro," she says, "but I sure as hell  do know you broke the lights."

"It did take a long time to fix that," someone mutters to themself. Dane isn't sure who said it and he doesn't want to know. 

He is definitely sure that Ibragimova tries to back him up, only to be met with derisive laughter, a few rude remarks from Toulan about her lack of experience, and someone shouting, "Why're you defending him? He almost tore your wife's arm off!" 

"O'Malley said they can fix her up at HQ," Ibragimova reminds everyone, "and she said—"

"She was about to die of blood loss, she would've said anything!"

"She  _ said —" _

"—you weren't even there, you were too busy hanging out with the _impostor—"_

"So how could he hurt her if he was with—"

"—the impostor!"

Dane has never experienced a meeting this volatile. On any other ship, he definitely would've been ejected by now—not that he's complaining. It's just weird. It's stressful, and he's still scared out of his mind (and  oh how he wishes he could take that literally and just get rid of this itchy human brain), but he has a strange feeling of hope, too. Maybe his amygdala isn't as good as he thought. Why should he feel hopeful? They're gonna eject him, no matter what Ibragimova and Muñoz say. 

"...wouldn't even tell us what city he's from! Like, how did he fool—"

"—I know, right! How—"

"—just saying  _I_ never—"

In the midst of all this noise, the emergency button on the table blares again. The alarm sounds different this time, higher-pitched with more varied beeps instead of than a low, angry siren. Dane feels his ears begin to lose their shape—just a little, but it's enough to distract him from the yelling and the alarm and the engines humming in the background. He should shift now (god knows he wants to), and escape, but he  can't.  (He's not sure why). It wouldn't help him in the long run either; they'd just scan the ship for alien matter at HQ and fry him alive with radiation or something equally unsavory. 

The new alarm cuts off abruptly in the middle of one rising wail. The speaker in the emergency button crackles with static for a moment, the sound a microphone makes when there's nothing around for it to pick up. The entire crew stills. The arguments stop. Even Toulan stops glaring at Dane and turns to stare down at the middle of the table, waiting to hear what the button will do next. 

The static's volume steadily increases until it's just brushing the edge of painful instead of annoying, then levels off and dies out. Silence. 

"Attention, incoming MIRA vessels! Do not eject! Maintenance drones down! Do not eject!" 


End file.
